Yes, anti-Vaxxers are coming for coronavirus vaccines

The deployment of covid-19 vaccines in the United States is finally start take steam, but as vaccination becomes more common, the anti-ax movement is pulling its same old tricks. Latest worrying trend: blaming the coronavirus vaccine for deaths, illnesses or injuries without any solid evidence.

Antivax organizations are already trying to misrepresent reports of people who died or were injured after receiving the vaccine as evidence that they are dangerous. Last week Children’s Health Defense – founded by famed Crank Robert Kennedy, Jr. –posted an article suggesting that the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron on Jan.22 was caused by the Moderna vaccine he received on Jan.5. This week, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office reported that Aaron had died of natural causes at the age of 86. somewhere else also had to spend time debunking viral claims of vaccine-related deaths.

As with many conspiracy theories, there is a grain of truth in the lies told by anti-vaxxers.

Vaccines, like any medicine, have side effects. Usually, but not always, these side effects are seen in clinical trials before they reach the general public. Shortly after similar vaccines Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech obtained emergency approval, for example, there were isolated reports of allergic reactions to vaccines, reactions that had not been documented in clinical trials. .

However, not all bad things that happen after taking a drug or vaccine – what scientists call an “adverse event” – are not side effects. People get sick for many different reasons and often the appearance of an unpleasant headache or other symptoms after treatment is nothing more than a coincidence. This is why it is so important to compare the groups of people who are given the real medicine to those who are given a placebo. If certain adverse events are much more common in the treatment group than in the placebo group, we can be pretty sure that this is a real side effect.

Deaths are also an unfortunate part of reality, especially for high-risk groups such as the elderly who are currently a priority for covid-19 vaccines. People have died and will continue to die shortly after receiving a covid-19 vaccine, but this alone is not strong evidence that the vaccine caused their deaths.

In the largest clinical trials to date, involving tens of thousands of people, common symptoms related to Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines included injection site pain, headache, fatigue and muscle pain. Rarer side effects included an increased risk of Bell’s palsy, a temporary paralysis of the face. But there was no evidence of an increased risk of death after vaccination. And both vaccines have been shown to be very effective in preventing covid-19 disease, which has killed more than 2 million people within a year.

This does not mean that reports of death or injury after vaccination should not be investigated by relevant health agencies and scientists (and, in fact, they are). A key part of scientific research is tracking public health issues that are potentially related to a new drug or vaccine, and sometimes new issues are discovered. But we should be wary of immediately blaming the covid-19 vaccines for frightening symptoms or tragic deaths, at least not without a fair amount of evidence to back up those claims. Likewise, the media should not use sensational headlines when presenting these cases

Researched and anecdotal reports aside, the concrete evidence for the safety and efficacy of these vaccines seems encouraging. On Monday, Israel – arguably the best performing country in the world when it comes to immunizing people – released some of its first data on how vaccination has gone. The data, taken from the country’s public insurers, found that residents were extremely unlikely to be diagnosed with covid-19 after their second dose of Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. Other information keep on going to show a very low risk of serious side effects such as anaphylaxis – with 10 cases discovered in 4 million people who received the Moderna vaccine – and no deaths reported linked to these allergic reactions.